OpenAI's ‘code red’ response to Gemini-3 could arrive next week: here's what we know about GPT-5.2

Earlier this week, there were multiple report claiming that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had raised ‘code red’ in an internal memo after increasing competiton from rivals like Google and Anthropic. Since then OpenAI's Head of ChatGPT Nick Turley has publicly confirmed that ads aren't just yet dropping for the chatbot while a new report by The Verge now claims that the company's response to rivals could be arriving as soon as next week.

Reportedly, OpenAI's response to Gemini-3, which has been ranked on top of multiple benchmarks, will be GPT-5.2. The model was said to debut later in December but the pressure from Gemini-3 is said to have forced the ChatGPT maker's hand and the new model is now reported to drop on 9 December.

The report does caution that the GPT-5.2 release may shift a little in response to ‘development challenges, server capacity issues’ or rival AI model announcements.

An earlier report from The Information had stated that OpenAI's next reasoning model “ahead of Gemini 3”, as per the company's internal evaluations.

Notably, OpenAI had launched its GPT-5.1 model last month but the Gemini 3 launch just a week later took the spotlight from the AI startup. Meanwhile, OpenAI has been unable to get its image generation and editing game to the mark since the GPT-4o native image generation capabilties release March this year that led to the viral Ghibli style image trend.

In contrast, Google was nowhere close in the image generation space but totally turned the tide first with Nano Banana and more recently with Nano Banana Pro launch. The new Google models are ranked on top of several benchmarks and some of their features like access to Google Search and consistent text rendering, blow a lot of other rivals out of the way.

In the memo, Altman reportedly said that OpenAI would be pushing back on some of the other initiatives by the company, like bringing ads to ChatGPT, AI agents for health and shopping and the personal assistant Pulse.

The San Francisco based AI startup had earlier declared code orange to improve ChatGPT. OpenAI is said to have three colour codes to mark the severity of problems, with red being the highest priority, followed by orange and yellow.